Beta Feedback

This is a refreshing experience coming from Call of Duty and Halo. Thank you. Having not played BF 4 or 2042 in a while, it feels nostalgic and more tuned in many areas. After maxing all the guns, playing ever class, and each vehicle; here's my 50 hour takeaway.

• Infantry:
  • Movement: Don't change a thing. One sprint speed one direction, knife out to go faster, and the slide is perfect. Nothing over the top, lets you dodge the 6+ scope glints staring you down, and you can get where you need to go. This isn't CoD please don't make us become sonic the hedgehog.
  • Aim: There are a lot of different sensitivities for if you are on foot, or in a car, and while this can be good, it felt like despite changing these values, they were not implemented correctly. 
  • Gunplay: Nearly all the gun felt optimized and well balanced for their roles. I maxed all but two of them. I did not enjoy the points allocation for the attachments, I would have rather been able to put whatever I wanted for the role I wished to play, but I can understand the balancing issues that may come with them being removed. Perhaps have the attachments have more pros and cons to offset the removal of the points system instead?
    • The PW7A2 SMG felt out performed by every other weapon in the game despite its monster hipfire precision and firerate. I think it needs either a small increase in fire rate or a 2-3 dmg point increase.
    • The B36A4 AR felt off in terms of ADS while moving precision. I felt like I was hipfiring while ADS. Im not sure it this was attachment related, or the gun itself, but it underperforming due to this. 
    • The Stinger Lock-on distance is way too far. On Liberation Peak, you could shoot the heli taking off from C, and often enough I would be hovering around A or E and be getting fired upon from the opposite location ( A or E). Considering the Heli can hardly kill anything from the gunner seat farther than what seems to be 100 meters at best due to its massive spread of rounds, something needs to change, be it the lock on distance or the gunner accuracy.
    • Remove the sweetspot and scope glint. Snipers are meant to be stealthy not a blinding beacon. Add tracer lines instead or something. The Sniper felt great, especially when shooting at engaged targets for one hits. The headshot box seems a little too small though. The amount of times where it looks like you hit someone in the head only for it to say 92 dmg was a bit too much. I think a 10 to 20% hit box lengthen would be suffice? Since we have to new run and slide tech, people should be less predictable to hit as a counter to this idea.
  • Classes:
    • Assault: Giving the third weapon (the shotgun) felt amazing. {I hear people complaining about the shotgun, it's fine. Falloff range is more than most games and actually usable yet still arcade-y. The spread is far tighter like a real shell and not comically large. You hit the sweet range, one pump champ, you miss and you're either lucky to get the second shot or dead. And the slugs only really one shot at closer than pellets range or the head so... IDK what others are getting.} The stim felt really underwhelming to use, considering you rarely got into a fight that it mattered. Maybe give it instant healing properties (all or some), and or HP recovery/delay %?
    • Engineer: Letting them have both anti armor and air launchers felt great. It was cumbersome in previous titles to only have one or the other when it was vehicle crack hours. Give them access to C4 too.
    • Support: Perfection. I played it the most after recon. The defibs had some very minor bratty nature when on slightly different elevations than whatever you were trying to revive.
    • Recon: Spawn beacon were also a little bratty when it came to placement on even the slightest bump. I can definitely understand why you will be changing the beacon to assault, however, Im concerned for the nature of how it changes the culture of acquiring a tactical positions of DMR/Sniper gameplay when we like to take up long out of the way positions. Getting there only to die and not having that beacon is... saddening. Also, the motion sensor doesn't care about elevation, only radius. Having been in very tall places on the maps, I could easily detect anything vertically outside its horizontal radius.  Bug or feature, you decide!

• Ground Vehicle:
  • Movement: Once you optimize the control movement options, it feels great, but there's a ton of options, some not explained clearly or at all. There was a moment where I had to hog each vehicle for like 10 minutes just to set everything up and that wasn't very fun for the others who had no chill seeing you afk in base. People are wild. 
  • Aim: The third person camera feels too zoomed in and off angled. Perhaps let us change these values in UI, or on the fly with a hotkey? Also being able to whip your turret around in third person but not in first is mildly inconvenient. Again, Im not sure if this was a missed option or as intended. While in the secondary gunner seat, the aim sensitivity was too high and too many options for figuring out which controlled this seat. I just wanted it to match my infantry sensitivity as muscle memory is king. 

• Air Vehicle Movement/Aim: These need work. Maybe I missed some options but again, I was trying again and again to optimize their controls and I felt like I was flying a physics defying brick. The heli felt overly momentum based and slow turned compared to BF 4 where I flew like a bat out of hell. I can understand if there was a balancing thought, but this time around it's too clunky. As for the jet, I felt like it was impossible to fly with just WASD and a mouse, you needed to use the keys for pitching up and down. I feel like your mouse should act as if it was a flight stick once in control based on the sensitivity and distance moved from original center location. ( The same for the first person in the tank, I dont want to have to keep dragging and picking up my mouse just to move, I realize switching to third to move fast IS optimal, but I should not have to disorient myself to do this)
  
  • The Heli is very toned down this time around. I would be okay with this IF AA emplacements and the stinger lock on was not so soul crushing. The max engagement distance only felt like a 100m which is nothing when vertical. It was like having to hover still and be right on top of the area you wanted to shoot to kill anything due to the spread of the rounds. As stated far above in gunplay, either lock on and AA guns need to change, or give the heli gunner more accuracy.  Lastly, my heli health pool complaint is only relevant if you are not going to change either of these. Since ever engineer has access to both launchers, and only one or two shots hitting you kills you... at obscene ranges... Heli will need more HP if nothing is being nerfed. 
  • The plane weaponry is balanced. Its the controls as stated above. As if "play with controller or cry" was the basis it was designed upon.

• UI Optimization: There are a ton of options, which is good and bad. Great because there were a lot of things I could fine tune and worked well. Bad because some of them were so similarly named or not given a clear description, that it took way too long to fiddle with to figure it out. Also, when backing up a menu, it puts you back to the main menu of the options and you had to click back through tabs, that was the most frustrating part. (Maybe I missed a button to not do that but geez) 

• Glitches!: Oh boy, lets talk about Siege of Cairo. It was definitely not intended for us to gain access to be on top of the buildings. People mald over it. Personally, it's like the battlefield experience for people to parachute down into wild as hell places and be rooftop hoppers. It just sucked that you had to either use an active tank who pointed their turret and literally shot you up into the air, or climbed up an area deep in enemy spawns territory. Needless to say, either remodel some buildings so that everyone can get up there, or make a height ceiling/kill barrier. You may have to extend that concept to all of your maps where you dont intend for people to go, because we know it exists on one map, and now all the game glitchers will be looking for all those nooks in every map. So its going to happen. So please dont just start banning people for being goblins, your game is so refreshingly good.

• Geometry: There are plenty of lumps of rocks or walls in which visably you are peaking around or hidden behind. YET plenty of times I will be shooting behind said rock or wall only to see rubble crumbs flying upwards and not down range. Or being behind said cover, only to be fatally headshot and shown the shooter with no line of sight comparably. So either its the game objects, or server side to user error. Either way, it's not fun to encounter when you would have not died because of it. 

All in all. I cannot wait for the full game despite all these listed issues. Its so refreshing and explosive. This is the most fun Ive had since BF4 original release. For the love for all that is good, please don't get crazy with skins like CoD. Yes some cool decals for vehicles and weapons would be nice, but please dont reskin in weapon bongs and death animation confetti. 

Thank you for listening to my TED talk.